North Carolina is facing a very big mental health care challenge — 28 counties across the state do not have a single psychiatrist. That’s despite the fact that in recent years, emergency rooms in the state have seen more patients with mental health, developmental disability or substance abuse problems.

So the state is trying telepsychiatry. When a patient comes into an emergency room, they can be connected via a two-way video connection with a psychiatrist. A recent study by the nonpartisan North Carolina Center for Public Policy Research found that the method is having some success in providing more timely treatment.

One of the psychiatrists, Dr. Sy Atezaz Saeed, told NPR’s Robert Siegel that that’s very much like being face-to-face with a patient.

“When you ask patients about this experience, most of them will tell you that after a few minutes of some hesitation, they even forget that they are talking to the doctor via this monitor,” Saeed, the chairman of the psychiatry department at the Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University, says.

A clinic I go to has been doing some tele-diagnosis for a while with quite a bit of success. It seems to be an even more natural fit for psychiatric help, if the security concerns are always adequately addressed, that is. In our NSA-is-everywhere world that may never be the case.

Stephen Kruiser is a professional comedian and writer who has also been a conservative political activist for over two decades. A co-founder of the first Los Angeles Tea Party, Kruiser often speaks to grassroots groups around America and has had the great honor of traveling around the world entertaining U.S. troops.

Not only is he a fraud, he was a fraud who specifically created that junk science to destroy Western Civilization (I remember he said, when travelling to America in the early 1900s, that he was "bringing them [the West] the Plague" in reference to his psychoanalysis/psychotherapy methods).

Psychiatrists today hardly do psychotherapy, in the sense of talking with patients, at all. They just prescribe drugs. I've been told that most psychiatrists today don't even get training in psychotherapy.